Discussion: Printing Emails

This is kind of a "what is your opinion" thread more than anything important. It's been something that makes my eye twitch every time I hear about my users "printing" their emails to "keep a copy" for themselves.

Now I know there are times when you need to print copies of emails and I'm fine with that, but generally speaking, isn't the point of email to save time, paper and postage?

In my company there are multiple people that probably print 10-30 emails or more per day "for their records". This generally is limited to emails they send, but not always. In a few rare cases I have even had users print hard copies of some of their sent items, and then they proceed to delete those emails...

As long as daily backups are being performed on the server where your email is kept everything should be safe and (hopefully) searchable, right?

I'm not trying to knock anyone that prints emails, but I'd like to see if anyone sees this as a good practice, or is it just a bad habit?

I haven't had time to try and figure out the real cost in my environment, so I can't yet say if this is a mountain sized problem or mole hill sized annoyance.

But part of it is almost certainly that executives are used to hearing "well, that server crashed, and we don't have it backed up properly, so that email is lost and gone forever, oh my darling...", well... you get the idea.

It probably *is* a bad habit, but I can understand why they do it.

How can you earn the right to tell them they don't have to?

Well, ask yourself this question: if a murder case ends up turning on an email on your system, are you willing to go up for aiding and abetting if that email can't be produced in court?

If not, then you're probably not backing up assiduously enough.

Jay R. Ashworth - ZCS 6.0.9CE/CentOS5 - St Pete FL US - Music - Blog - Photography - IANAL - IAAMATry to Ask Questions The Smart Way -- you'll get better answers.
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